G325 Conventions

1. Ali N March 2014
Explain how far your understanding of the conventions of existing media influenced the
way you created your own media products. Refer to a range of examples in your answer
to show how this understanding developed over time?
In this essay I am going to write about how the use of conventions influenced my
productions starting from AS and progressing onto A2. Started of at AS with knowing
little how to use conventions to progressing how to use conventions in the right way by
using challenging or developing them to attract the target audience.
During my production of the opening two minutes of a film at AS I looked at the
mainstream conventions and normally went with using then as I was not to confident with
challenging them to attract my audience in the right way. I researched into youth culture
films and found that 6 out of 7 movies such as Anuvahood, Kidulthood etc had a plot
revolving around hardships such as gang culture, poverty crime, and family problems etc.
so I decided to use this convention by putting two different forms of hardships on my two
main characters, the main actor has been brought up on the streets in very poo family, and
Flo the main actress has a very discouraging and busy middle classed family.
At AS I looked at other conventions such as drug use, violence etc and used them in
scenes where we see drug dealing. However at A2 I went deeper into the conventions and
looked at the tiniest conventions such as how many songs have lyrics that match the song
etc, and I had the confidence to challenge these conventions because I was confident that
I could attract my targeted audience even though I'm going against my genres common
conventions as through audience research I found out 4 out of 7 people liked it when the
lyrics were not matching the visuals. Two songs which contradicted the lyrics used were
avril lavignes-When you’re gone and maroon 5-when you’re gone, and I decided to
challenge this by matching my lyrics with my visuals with archive footage of tanks and
bombs when the artist talks about guns and boms in war singing “and their guns and their
bombs”.
At AS the only product we made was the opening two minutes of the films while at A2
we progressed at making a main video along with the digipak and a website to market our
band. This required me to improve my use of conventions as I didn’t have to look at how
the visuals of a video look with mis en scene etc. but I also had to look how these bands
are represented and through what way with smaller things such as font style etc. which
wasn’t required at A2. At AS I researched into movies such as Bullet boy with similar
genres and looked at the setting of the movie, the clothes the artists wore and the
language they used, which we went on and used and developed on. We found out that 7/7
movies had the main male characters using scruffy clothes always using the stereotype of
a wearing a hoodie being bad, and the language used in these movies was british slang
which was used to target audience of the similar age of the actors engaged as they are
able to relate. However at A2 I also looked at websites of bands such as Maroon 5, and
Foo fighters and looked at the genre conventions and I found out key conventions such as
¾ movies had bold font and used images of the band as the background. With our website

2. we decided to use all our the existing genre conventions and developing them at some
points. For e.g. we found out ¾ websites changed their background page on every site,
which I believed was done to keep the audience engaged so we used this idea and also
developed on it by having multiple images on the homepage which gives the audience a
good first view of the website. At A2 we also looked at products marketed on social
websites such as facebook and twitter that was similar to AS yet developed at A2. At AS
we found out if thes opening two minutes of a movie mentioned the facebook page yet at
A2 we had to look if the videos, digipaks and websites (3/4 websites linked to facebook
and twitter) linked to facebook and also how the bands was marketed on these websites,
so we improved the way we used our conventions, by not just looking if facebook was
mentioned but also how it was used.
At A2 we also had another product to do was to form, which was a digipak. Some of the
research I did for the website was similar to what I did for the digipak such as the font
used on the digipaks and I developed on AS in the same way buy looking at deeper
details. At AS I looked at the use of colour through the clothes worn by the characters
which were dark six out of 7 times, forming a convention being challenged only by one
movie, which is ‘my brother the devil’, where the main character is shown to wear bright
coloured shirts. At A2 I had to look at the use of colour in greater detail looking how the
base colour of the digipak, the colour of the font used, any colour effects given to images.
I found out that the digipaks conventionally had dark based colours as I found out ¾
movies had Dark base colours while Foo fighters challenged this by red-based colours.
Through my audience research I found that dark based colours were the way to go as 7/7
believed that dark colours represent pop/grunge bands properly, so I followed this
conventions by using dark based colours in my digipak and website which I believe was
key in attracting our audience. From AS to A2 one of the main progressions I made was
to know when to use, develop or challenge the common genre conventions to attract my
targeted audience while representing the band properly as a dark, mysterious band.
To conclude I would say there were various progressions I made from AS to A2, which
were due to the different products, I was required to make at A2 that weren’t required at
AS. I also learnt to use the conventions wisely as I wasn’t confident to challenge
conventions at AS while at A2 I knew what I was doing, which I helped me produce my
products to be unique and different to stand out to our targeted audience and represent
our band the way we want them to be represented.